National Gallery of Art Acquires Glenn Ligon Painting

A black-and-white text painting by the African-American artist Glenn Ligon hangs in the White House, in the private quarters of the Obamas, on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington.

Mr. Ligon, a favorite of the president and first lady, was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York last year, and his work has been collected by the likes of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

Until now, however, the National Gallery of Art in Washington had owned only a suite of etchings and a print portfolio by Mr. Ligon. This week it announced that it had bought a painting, “Untitled (I Am a Man).” A reinterpretation of the signs carried by many of the 1,300 striking African-American sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 — made famous by Ernest Withers’s photographs of the march — it came straight from the artist’s collection through Luhring Augustine, his Chelsea gallery. Years ago Mr. Ligon saw one of the actual signs in Representative Charles B. Rangel’s office, and that inspired the painting.

Using phrases from real events or from the writings of figures like James Baldwin and Malcolm X is a Ligon trademark. “Untitled (I Am a Man),” from 1988, is the first example of his use of text.

“Glenn was 28 when he painted this,” said Molly Donovan, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery. “That was roughly 20 years after that incident in Memphis, and it was that historic moment that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis.”

The painting will go on view Tuesday in the National Gallery’s East Building concourse.

A MOMENT OF SILENCE AT MOMA

The Museum of Modern Art’s latest acquisition is not expected to be a crowd pleaser. It is as quiet and minimal as anything in MoMA’s collection. Consisting of just three folded sheets of almost blank onionskin paper (some with just a vertical line reminiscent of what the artist Barnett Newman would call a zip), it is the earliest extant version of “4’33,” ” John Cage’s composition consisting entirely of silence.

In the early 1950s, when Cage was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, he wrote the composition in three movements lasting 4 minutes 33 seconds, during which time the performer never touches a note. It was first performed by the pianist David Tudor, in Woodstock, N.Y., on Aug. 29, 1952, in an auditorium that was open to the woods. To differentiate one movement from another, Tudor opened and closed the piano lid three times. During the first movement of that performance, the audience could hear the sound of wind; during the second, rain started to fall; and during the third, according to Calvin Tomkins in his book “Off the Wall,” “the audience added its own perplexed mutterings to the other ‘sounds not intended’ by the composer.”

The first version of the score, written in the language of conventional music with measures of silence to indicate each movement, was given to Tudor before the concert but was lost. Cage made this second version featuring a graphic rendering of the three movements corresponding to periods of silence. Each space between the vertical lines on the paper corresponds to the specific duration (7 inches equals 56 seconds). There are four known later versions, one of which is in the New York Public Library.

Photo

“Untitled (I Am a Man),” a 1988 painting by Glenn Ligon, at the National Gallery.Credit
Glenn Ligon, National Gallery of Art, Washington

This version was purchased for the museum by Henry R. Kravis, the New York financier, in honor of his wife, Marie-Josée, MoMA’s president. Mr. Kravis bought it from the artist Irwin Kremen, who had been given the score by Cage on June 5, 1953, for Mr. Kremen’s 28th birthday.

“It’s between music and art, a score but also a drawing as well,” said Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s chief curator of prints and illustrated books.

While the museum is not generally known as a repository of musical manuscripts, it does have other scores by Cage, including “Solo for Voice, No. 2” from 1960, along with examples of artist-illustrated scores by Braque, Bonnard and Calder.

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“4’33” ” was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings,” the first of which was made in 1951, when Rauschenberg, too, was at Black Mountain College. Cage described these paintings as “airports for the lights, shadows and particles.”

“How can you think of Rauschenberg without Cage?” Mr. Cherix said. “This gives the museum a fuller representation.” MoMA also owns many seminal works by Rauschenberg, although none of his “White Paintings.”

The score will be on view next summer in a sharply focused show.

CHINESE CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Asia Society begins its five-year Arts and Museum Network initiative in Beijing on Friday and Saturday, with 15 American museum directors and officials meeting their counterparts at Chinese museums.

“In the 20th century we saw most of our significant museums built here in the United States,” said Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society Museum in New York. “Now, as we enter the 21st century, we will see many more museums built in Asia, where in China alone the government has spoken of having 1,000 new museums in the next decade.”

Ms. Chiu noted that “museums here are mostly private, whereas in China they are mostly public.”

The meeting is intended to increase understanding between the cultures and to encourage loans. Talks will continue next October at a major gathering at Asia Society’s new cultural center and exhibition space in Hong Kong.

NEW MODERN ART CURATOR AT MET

As the Metropolitan Museum of Art prepares to take over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Breuer-designed building temporarily beginning in 2015, Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s new chairwoman of modern and contemporary art, has started to build her own team. On Tuesday afternoon the Met’s board approved the appointment of Nicholas Cullinan, one of Ms. Wagstaff’s former colleagues at the Tate Modern in London, where she had been chief curator before going to the Met in May.

Dr. Cullinan is the Tate Modern’s curator of international modern and contemporary art. At the Met he will be a curator in the modern and contemporary art department. At the Tate Dr. Cullinan worked on many exhibitions, including ones devoted to Duchamp, Man Ray, Twombly and Munch.

“Part of my remit here is to extend our global reach, which I did at the Tate, where Nick has been a key player,” Ms. Wagstaff said. When he comes to the Met next year he will be working on exhibitions, installations and acquisitions, both at the Breuer building and at the Met.

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2012, on Page C28 of the New York edition with the headline: National Gallery of Art Acquires Glenn Ligon Painting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe